Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

International Initiatives

BEAR

• Title: from BEhavioral Analysis to modeling and simulation of interactions between walkeRs

• International Partner: Michael Cinelli (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) and Michael Barnett Cowann (University of Waterloo, Canada)

• Start year: 2019

• See also: https://sites.google.com/view/inriabearproject/home

Interactions between individuals are by definition at the very core of our society since they represent the basic synergies of our daily life. When walking in the street or in more dynamical and strategic situations such as sports motion, we take in information about our surrounding environment in order to interact with people, move without collision, alone or in a group, intercept, meet or escape other people. In this context, the BEAR project is a collaboration between researchers from Inria Rennes (Computer Sciences) and Waterloo universities (Kinesiology-Neuroscience). The project aims at providing more realistic models and simulations of interactions between pedestrians, for various applications such as rehabilitation, computer graphics, or robotics. The originality of the project is to investigate the complexity of human interactions from a human motor control perspective, considering the strong coupling between pedestrians’ visual perception and their locomotor adaptations. We will investigate how people gather the relevant information to control their motion. To provide generic models considering the inter-individual variability of humans, we will consider both normal populations and specific populations (children, older adults, injured, diseased ...) for whom an altered perception can modify their motion. The strength of this project is the complementarity of theinvolved teams. While all researchers will equally perform experiments on interactions between pedestrians, the researchers from Waterloo will take the lead to identify the relevant behavioral variables that will be used mainly by the researchers from Rennes to design the new models and simulations.

• Mitacs Globalink grant: Perception-Action Integration in Collision Avoidance in Older Adults, Robyn Grundberg, University Wilfrid Laurier, Canada (April-July 2019)

• Mitacs Globalink grant: Influence of walking speed and trunk sway on collision avoidance with a virtual human, Sheryl Bourgaize, University Wilfrid Laurier, Canada (April-July 2019).

• Dr. Rachel McDonnell, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (on-going collaboration with Ludovic Hoyet)

• Prof. Carol O Sullivan, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (on-going collaboration with Ludovic Hoyet)

• Prof Michael Cinelli, University Wilfrid Laurier, Waterloo, Canada (on-going collaboration with Anne-Hélène Olivier)

• Prof Michael Barnet-Cowann, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada (on-going collaboration with Anne-Hélène Olivier)

• Prof. Hui Huang, Shenzhen University (on-going collaboration with Marc Christie)

• Prof. Baoquan Chen, Pekin University (on-going collaboration with Marc Christie)

• Dr. Bin Wang, Beijing Film Academy University (on-going collaboration with Marc Christie)